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Extracts from Sensibilities
December 2003 - Volume 27

Contents

• The Unfinished Watsons - Patrick Wilson
• Lord Byron’s ‘Dark Blue Seas’ – Poetic Reference in Jane Austen’s Novels - Gavin Turner

Papers from the JASA Conference 2003 ‘Jane Austen and Happiness’

• Happiness - Robin Grove
• Bring in the Clowns: The Comedic Monologues and Dialogues of Austen’s Fiction, or How Austen Keeps her Audience Laughing - Laurie Kaplan
• Land Reform in Jane Austen’s Time: Will Enclosure Make the Clergy Happy? - Celia A Easton
• Enclosure in Practice: Emma’s Highbury - Bertha McKenzie
• Working Out a Happy Conclusion: Mansfield Park & the Revision of King Lear - Susan Allen Ford

The Unfinished Watsons

JASA member Patrick Wilson is a retired civil engineer living in Brisbane, and the author of the 2002 Where’s Where in Jane Austen ... and What Happens There.

Talk presented to the June 2003 JASA meeting 

Lord Peter Wimsey, that greatest of all fictional detectives, pursued the love of his life, Harriet Vane, through five or six novels over a period of five or six years. It was a tempestuously intellectual courtship, freely sprinkled with classical references and infuriatingly untranslated French quotations. Both the final proposal of marriage and its acceptance were in Latin.

At one point, shortly before this eminently satisfactory conclusion, and during one of their long introspective discussions, Lord Peter said to Harriet – ‘The only sin that passion can commit is to be joyless. It must lie down with laughter or make its bed in hell.’ Lord Peter was no doubt speaking specifically about sexual passion, but he knew, as of course did his creator, Dorothy L Sayers, that this applied to all manner of passions – religious passion, artistic passion, political passion, musical passion, sporting passion, literary passion – and the rest. They must all lie down with laughter or make their beds in hell.

Now I find Jane Austen’s fragment of a novel, The Watsons, particularly joyless, and I do believe that Austen came to feel very much the same herself. 

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Lord Byron’s ‘Dark Blue Seas’: Poetic Reference in Jane Austen’s Novels

Gavin Turner is an author and lecturer, and is Chairman of the Jane Austen Bath and Bristol Group in the UK. His published work includes editions of Christopher Anstey’s The New Bath Guide (first published 1766) and An Election Ball (first published 1776) (Broadcast Books, Briston, 1994 and 1997), and he recently revised and edited for the Jane Austen Society in the UK its new edition of Jean Freeman’s Jane Austen in Bath. 

Talk presented to the October 2003 JASA meeting

Jane Austen’s views on the importance of the novel as a literary form are well established. Not only is there the assertion, in a letter to Cassandra of December 1798 that their family ‘are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so’; there is also that spirited defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey.

Her views on poetry are less easy to determine. Jane’s letters indicate that she read a lot of poetry, especially of contemporary work, although her brother Henry, in his Biographical Notice, emphasised the extent of her reading in history and belles-lettres, and her intimate acquaintance ‘with the best essays and novels in the English language’.

He did add, however, that ‘her favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse’4, a point confirmed by the testimony of her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh in his Memoir, that among ‘her favourite writers, Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and Cowper in both, stood high’5. Jane clearly delighted in writing verses, inheriting a special talent for this from her mother. There is the very touching poem written in memory of her friend Mrs Lefroy; and the elegiac quality of this can be contrasted with a number of humorous pieces, such as ‘Oh! Mr Best you’re very bad / And all the world shall know it;/ Your base behaviour shall be sung/ By me, a tuneful Poet’.

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Happiness

Robin Grove is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. He co-edits one of Australia’s longest-running literary journals, The Critical Review, and has published extensively in Australia and abroad on topics ranging from Chaucer to Samuel Beckett. Originally trained as a musician, he is active in advocacy and performance of classical music, and in 2001 he received a Fulbright Award for International Dance Scholarship.

We all have our own ideas about it. Dr Johnson defined it as ‘the recollection of being swiftly drawn in a chaise over undulating turf in the company of a beautiful and witty woman’. Shakespeare, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have been especially interested in it, nor indeed were the English dramatists in general. A few Renaissance poets, perhaps, but not the early male novelists – Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, etc. – whose attraction to random disasters, burlesques, imbroglios and other such stimulants, meant that happiness – that elusive glow of mind and body – didn’t stand much of a chance. With few exceptions, not till the late 18th century does it claim a significant place in European art. But with Haydn and Mozart it comes centre-stage, to culminate in The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute, and sustain the string quartets. What music has expressed a deeper confidence in ordinary, unheroic human nature and its capacity to delight in itself? One could follow the theme through the newly informalised country houses of the time, the garden landscapes of natural paradise, the paintings of domestic life, or churches dedicated to uplifting the senses, rather than overwhelming them with awe. A new respect for happiness affected intellectual life at any number of points: theology, politics, art criticism. The noble pronouncements of the Declaration of Independence even founded a nation on the expectation of it:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men.

It is a radical re-imagining of what governments are for: instituted (says the Declaration) to make possible the pursuit of happiness, not just for emperors, but for that very 18th-century category, ‘all men’. Armed with this idea, civil life is redefined as a matter of rights rather than duties or obligations, and central to these rights is the freedom to search for a well-being both individual and democratic. 

Jane Austen is part of this revolutionary impulse, going further even than her great contemporary, Wordsworth, and further than the Declaration of Independence which came into the world exactly a year after she did. The pursuit of happiness, as she sees it, is the right not just of every man, but of every woman too. 

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Bring in the Clowns: The Comedic Monologues and Dialogues of Austen’s Fiction, or How Austen Keeps her Audience Laughing

Laurie Kaplan is editor of JASNA’s journal Persuasions and Professor of English at Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland. She is also co-author, with Nancy Magnuson, of Twenty Five Years of Jane Austen on the extensive JA collection at Goucher. She has taught English literature at the University of Odessa in the Soviet Union, and was a Visiting Scholar at Newnham College, Cambridge University. 

We first began to read Jane Austen’s novels, I assume, because we ‘had’ to read them as part of our school English requirements. The point of reading was to finish the serious and weighty tome the teacher had assigned. We therefore read purely for plot – for the information we needed to pass an exam. I would guess that we read Pride and Prejudice and Emma with the sole purpose of, first, finishing the book that we had been assigned to read, and, second, finding Romance. Darcy and Elizabeth had to make a match; Mr Knightley and Emma had to end up together. Villains like Mr Wickham needed to be punished and snobs like Lady Catherine and Mrs Elton had to be rebuked. 

But did we see any comedy in the plots and dialogues and descriptions? Did we laugh? 

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Land Reform in Jane Austen’s Time: Will Enclosure Make the Clergy Happy? 

Celia Easton is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York College at Geneseo. She is Regional Coordinator of the Rochester Chapter of JASNA. Her scholarship on Jane Austen includes Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and the Joke of Substitution and an essay on ‘Emma & Grandison’ in Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Emma.

Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject [of the picturesque] to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence. (NA 111)

What interest might clergyman Henry Tilney have in land enclosure? Jane Austen doubtless knew, from conversations with clergymen of her own acquaintance, that in addition to allowing him to be conversant on gentlemen’s topics of the day, Henry Tilney’s political knowledge of land reform was part of the practical side of his education as a churchman. Although outside the university curriculum, news of enclosure came to churchmen through their associations with landowners in their parishes, through the reading of books and pamphlets on agriculture in England, if they farmed to supplement their income, and through their own research in economics when they discovered that enclosure affected the lives of people they served in their churches as well as their own incomes, if their livings were tied to agricultural tithes.

In the latter part of the 18th century, when enclosure of land across England increased many times over previous decades, clergymen, lawyers and farmers thought and wrote a great deal about enclosure. For the clergy, the topic of enclosure was a political as well as a personal concern. 

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Emma’s Highbury

Bertha McKenzie BA studied literature and history at the University of Sydney, where she became an administrator for many years, retiring as assistant Registrar in 1977. In 1989 the University published her research on its early buildings as Stained Glass and Stone: the Gothic Buildings of the University of Sydney. Her main interests now are researching Jane Austen on the internet, and reading.

In this ‘rider’ to Celia Easton’s foregoing article on Land Reform, JASA member Bertha McKenzie examines the effect of enclosure specifically on Highbury. 

‘at half a mile distant ... favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey-Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it’.1 

This is quite clearly a description of a farm after enclosure, a large tenanted farm owned by the squire, Mr Knightley. It is in distinct contrast to the English countryside as it would have been some 100 years earlier, a countryside of unenclosed fields, where there would be yeomen farmers (two or three acres) and smallholders, with a cottage and garden to keep a few animals, with rights to farm two or three strips or plots in the common arable fields and grazing and other rights on the waste common. There would be craftsmen, perhaps living over a shop, but also with strips, plots and waste common rights, and perhaps other squatters whose families had established similar rights over several generations.

Between 1796 and 1815 more than 1800 enclosure Bills were passed, 400 more than in the previous 40 years2 . The landscape was being rapidly transformed before the adult eyes of Jane Austen. In her novels, Jane Austen always observed the contemporary social custom that females did not openly discuss political or social problems, but, as more than one critic has observed, her descriptions of her characters, their circumstances and their settings, are an indirect commentary on the social scene. They reveal to a perceptive reader a great deal about social changes, the topics of the day, the characters’ incomes and their social class. 

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Working Out a Happy Conclusion: Mansfield Park & the Revision of King Lear

Susan Allen Ford is Professor of English and Writing Centre Coordinator at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, where she teaches courses in British Literature, the Gothic novel and detective fiction. She has presented at JASNA on Sanditon and Austen’s use of Mme de Genlis’ Adelaide and Theodore in Emma.

Mansfield Park is a novel characterised by anxiety, sorrow, anger, fear, resentment but very little happiness. Fanny, after being convinced by Mrs Norris that it is ‘a wicked thing for her not to be happy’, does indeed grow up at Mansfield ‘not unhappily among her cousins’. Austen’s grammar here suggests the quality of such happiness. What happiness there is in this novel seems infected, charged with negative emotions: driving into Sotherton, Maria’s spirits are in ‘as happy a flutter as vanity and pride could furnish’; when Edmund argues himself into acting in Lovers’ Vows, Tom and Maria are ‘happier for [his] descent’ to their level; Edmund’s happiness makes Fanny ‘wretched’. And Edmund, of course, looks forward to the marriage of Fanny and Henry Crawford, ‘trust[ing] that every thing would work out a happy conclusion’.

The words Jane Austen gives Edmund here are especially felicitous, for Edmund’s expectations suggest a confidence not just in the possibilities of happy conclusions within this novel but in the more complex and metafictional hope of a happy conclusion for this novel. It is this move toward a happy conclusion – and the disagreements about what that idea might encompass – that I want to consider here by examining precisely how working out Mansfield Park’s happy conclusion involves for Jane Austen Shakespeare’s darkest and least happy play. 

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03 February 2004

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